All posts by Andrea McDowell

The Geography of Hope had an odd genesis: writer Chris Turner, contemplating his daughter’s future in Canada’s oil capital of Calgary, was driven to find some reason to believe that her life would not be defined by climatic cataclysm.

I think I could teach her to face war, poverty, famine–human problems with practicible solutions, however complex. I could explain to her that life, as wonderful as it can be, is sometimes far from carefree. But I can’t even tell her with any confidence that there is a future with sufficient durability to serve as a drawing board for her lifelong dreams. There’s a legitimate possibility that she’ll face calamity on a scale I can’t imagine, on a scale beyond anything humanity’s ever seen. This is a prospect that makes it hard to think, makes my vision blur with angry, impotent tears. It terrifies me.

Me too.

Turner spent the following year touring the planet, finding examples of sustainability and solutions to the climate change crisis in villages in Thailand, cities in India, eco-communes in Scotland, institutes in America, and a dozen other places beside. As he repeats throughout, “anything that exists is possible”: we already have the knowledge, skills and technology to solve climate change. We just need to get off our asses and do it.

(It’s a salty book, by the way, dropping f-bombs with a far greater frequency than I’m used to in scientific texts.)

Consider the tech revolution, he argues; if someone had told you, in 1992, that one day you’d have a phone you could fit in your pocket that could read newspapers and letters from people all over the world, that could play your favourite songs, take photos, even video, and that you could buy one of these phones relatively cheap in any shopping mall in the western world (and, according to a recent story in the Star, that social-rights activists in the States would argue that having such a phone was a fundamental human right conferring access to potentially life-saving services for poor people), you would have told them they were nuts. It only took ten years to go from a world in which computers were relatively bulky and expensive desktop beasts useful for printing out term papers or keeping track of budgets to little lap-sized miracle gadgets that provide access to the world’s entire stored knowledge-base–and what it took to go from A to B was a whole lot of foolhardy investment in technologies and ideas that no one thought would work.

We’ve done it before, we can do it again. That’s his argument. And hey, this time it might save our collective lives, so supposedly there’s an additional incentive in there somewhere. The world can change on a dime.

Another example? Consider this quote, from near the book’s conclusion, about the futility of waiting for meaningful governmental action on climate change:

Who really expects anymore that dramatic, positive change will come into their lives from the current round of trade talks, the next stage of Kyoto negotiations, the coming election cycle or the one after that?

That was published in 2007.

Remember, on Tuesday, how impossible Obama’s victory seemed just one and a half years ago.

Recently I took myself to the bookstore to scan the magazine racks for potential markets for a pitch that came back to me the week before. (It came back nicely, with regrets and an invitation for more ideas, but I still need to find it a new home.) Three of the most promising magazines I brought home for detailed study, including ONnature (a publication of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists), the Ecologist and onearth (by the National Resources Defense Council). Frances Beinecke, the president of NRDC, opens her address with:

The end of an era has finally arrived. The man responsible for some of the most destructive environmental policies of the past 50 years is finally packing his bags, and a new president is arriving in Washington who wants to strengthen–rather than dismantle–the safeguards that protect our air, water and wilderness.

I even saw a magazine cover recently decrying hipsterism as “over” and “hope as the new cool.” I can’t remember which magazine that was, but let me tell you, as someone who’s been slaving away in the hope mines all these years while cynicism and defensive irony ruled above with an iron fist, it was the strangest combination of cognitive dissonance and celebration I can remember experiencing.

No one likes being Cassandra, but you get used to the status of derided outcast, to being ignored; and then to be hauled up on to a pedestal (even if only metaphorically) can be discomfiting. Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how every time I go to the bookstore–which is rather a lot–I stare and stare at the rack of new green titles? It’s been there for months. Sure, it’s mostly lifestyle tomes recycling advice about compact fluourescent lightbulbs and turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth, but there’s an entire prominently displayed section on environmentalism that appears to be a permanent fixture of the store.

They say no one is an atheist in a foxhole. It seems, these days, like
the whole world is feeling the bullets of climate change whizzing by
our ears, and remarkably, it’s making believers out of a lot of former
skeptics. Including high-profile ones. In A Passion for This Earth, a collection of essays “inspired by David Suzuki,” Michael Shermer writes of his own 11th-hour conversion in 2006. Long-time prominent climate-change skeptic Gregg Easterbrook (in his book titled A Moment on The Earth
he argued that environmental trends are nowhere near as menacing as the
media portrays and that climate change is not happening) retracted his
position and switched to alarm. More cognitive dissonance, more celebration mixed with panic.

Listen: I was a working environmentalist through the 1990s, and that was no easy gig. So I think I’m entitled to this.

On behalf of those of us who kept slogging away for the past fifteen years on global climate change and acid rain and deforestation and endangered species and smog while the two primary mainstream responses appeared to be an angry denial of any problems or utter apathy, preferably while prostrate on the floor, playing dead; on behalf of those who kept geekily clinging to hope while being accused of planet-defeating pessimism; on behalf of those of us who have been planting trees and buying organic and writing letters and participating in environmental assessments for the past fifteen years, all the while being told that a responsible adult would have given up on these lofty ideals and traded it in for a career in finance long ago, let me say two things:

Welcome. You have no idea how wonderful it is to finally have you along.

As it turns out, the friendly suggestion of emailing so-and-so for directions was less of a friendly suggestion and more of a base requirement, which makes me wonder why the directions weren’t just included with the volunteer package. In any case, we got to the right address at what I thought was the right time only to find that we were distinctly not in the right place, and had no idea what to do about it.

Instead of participating in an official bird count, therefore, we walked through the winter woods and counted a few birds on our own. And it was lovely. Cold. Very cold. But lovely. Heaps of pristine white snow crossed by those livid blue shadows you only get in winter. I’ll have to ask all my questions next year, along with the new one: Why on earth would you not include full directions with the volunteer package?

~~~~~

The one bird we heard most was the black-capped chickadee*, that improbably tiny ball of hollow bones and fluff. Chickadees are a species of titmouse, meaning a small bird, and are utterly unprepossessing: grey, black, brown, white. No impressive crests, no fan-shaped tails, no glorious songs. Not as famous as Raven or Coyote in native folklore. One Cherokee legend has it nick-named the Truth Teller for helping a tribe kill Spearfinger, a monster who would in the guise of a grandmother or favourite aunt slay children to eat their livers, but even its stories are not impressive enough to have made a mark on our modern consciousness. Only 12-15 cm (4-6″) from the tip of its bill to the tip of its tail.

But it will live outdoors through a Canadian winter.

It’s emblematic of a lot of the less-showy Canadian wildlife. It’s small. It doesn’t look like much; it’s hard to turn it into an award-winning photograph for National Geographic Magazine. It looks fragile enough to be knocked out by a toothpick. But it survives.

For that alone, if nothing else, it would be my favourite bird. I also happen to think it’s adorable.

~~~~~

* Truth-telling, in honour of the chickadee: I am pretty sure that’s what we heard. I’m not an expert on birds by any means, but I think the call was the chickadee-dee-dee for which the bird was named. Finding one for a positive id on the top of a 20-40 ft dense evergreen was too much for Frances’s binoculars, however.

Tomorrow, early enough to drag me out of bed at an ungodly hour for a weekend, I will be standing quietly in temperatures well below zero, in a large urban park, counting birds for a couple of hours.

Don’t ask me for details. I haven’t a clue what it entails, other than–presumably–silence and watchfulness. And layers.

Either disastrously or brilliantly, I will be accompanied by my preschool daughter, who is very excited about bringing her binoculars to see if she can count birds in the big park and help people. Assuming that she hasn’t been bundled up so thoroughly that, like Ralph’s little brother in A Christmas Story, she is incapable of moving her arms and so can’t put her binoculars to her eyes. I thought about hiring a babysitter, and then I thought about my bank balance, educational opportunities, and ways of instilling a love of the non-human in her. I also thought about post-count lunches at favourite restaurants featuring unethically-raised poultry products, but we’ll leave that out for now.

Every January, we cover the Polar Bear Dip–a bunch of people jumping into frozen water for a few minutes, then running inside for hot chocolate and fleece blankets. Every January, a bunch of volunteers stands around outside counting birds to measure the success of local wildlife programs for six hours, and I’ve never heard of it.

How do you count birds? How do you find them, in the first place? How many is a good number? What species do you want to find? Why do people volunteer for this year after year, some of them coming from a hundred kilometres away to do so? Who are they?

~~~~~

I just finished Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken’s book about the global environment-and-social-justice-movement with no name. It is a profoundly hopeful, if at times equally profoundly distressing, book, positing that in the complexity and the relationships between all of these tens of thousands of small organizations, globally, can be seen something like a new life form, an immune response to unsustainable practices. He offers no guarantee that this immune response will be effective, but makes it clear which way he thinks things will go. In a passage sure to resonate with other parents, he quotes from Michael Chabon:

“Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children–in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world–parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally runs down, ten thousand years from now, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imaginations for perfecting it is limitless and free.

Chabon’s son was eight when he asked that question. Children of eight have already learned to doubt the future of the human species? That is heartbreaking.

Also, it makes standing in the snow with a five-year-old, still innocent enough to be afraid primarily of the red roses on her bedroom curtains (they might be the eyes of monsters staring at her while she sleeps), for a couple of hours counting birds seem not only possible, but necessary.

I’ve cast my bet on the Clock of the Long Now, too; and I will do everything I can to stack that deck.

I have been over-researching an article on wind energy that will supposedly be published soon, though I have yet to hear back on the edits. It’s a problem of mine, this need to make every argument impervious to nuclear attack, as if it is possible to construct an argument that will convince everyone–especially in 1,200 words.

On the plus side, I now have a couple hundred pages worth of research that, for obvious reasons, is not going to make it into the published piece, or very likely any published piece. It’s all background. Lucky you, I thought it might make for interesting blog fodder.

Today: wind turbine noise, human health, access to science and how to dupe the public.

First, some background:

Wind Turbine Noise

Wind turbines make noise. How much noise and how annoying that noise is depends on who you ask. Dr. Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician from New York, will soon self-publish a book called Wind Turbine Syndrome, about the terrible effects that the noise from windfarms can have on human health. Understandably, it’s been snatched up by anti-wind energy groups internationally. She claims it’s peer-reviewed, but it’s not. Peer-review refers to a specific process where an academic journal asks a panel of experts in a particular field to comment on a text and offer suggestions for revision and critical feedback. What Dr. Pierpont refers to as “peer-review” on her website is really testimonial–fan feedback. You don’t get to choose peers in a real peer-review process.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that her information is wrong, although the arguments I’ve read criticizing her work I find at least as convincing as her work itself. It does mean that it lacks credibility. As she herself says on her website, academics publishing in peer-reviewed journals are the gold-standard in unbiased information. Dr. Nina Pierpont is not an academic, her work is not peer-reviewed, and her book does not count as an academic peer-reviewed publication.

A search of an academic database of articles in peer-reviewed journals (PubMed) turned up only two relevant studies, both by the same set of academics (there is a mountain of work on sound from wind turbines, but it is otherwise by acoustic engineers and other techy sorts who work with models and dBa estimates and theories about what should be bothersome, rather than measuring the effects of actual turbines on actual people. That’s not a flaw. We need that research. It’s just not what I was investigating). Here’s one:

Chances are you can’t read it. The problem with a lot of academic research in those vaunted peer-reviewed journals is that they’re available by subscription only, you can’t buy them at Chapters, and subscriptions are pricey. As a result, generally speaking, only other academics and students have access. Here’s a link to the abstract, and if you choose, you can buy yourself a copy of the individual article from their website.

The sample size is fairly large and the study design is, if anything, likely to overestimate the actual impact on human health. Pederson and Waye surveyed about 750 residents (out of a local population of 3,471) of Sweden living on average 780 metres from a wind turbine, and asked them about noise, annoyance and health impacts.

In other words, it’s based on self-reports. Self-reports are considered potentially less objective because people might not accurately assess what is going on with their own health (consider the number of people who get a cold confused with the flu every year). According to their study, respondents were more likely to be annoyed by wind turbine noise when they could see at least one turbine from a window in their home. The study seems more likely to overestimate the effects of such noise on respondents, then, than underestimate it. (Respondents were also more likely to be annoyed by turbine noise if they had a negative view of wind energy, but as the researchers did not examine whether the attitude came before the noise or vice versa–that is, whether the respondents were predisposed to dislike the noise before the turbines were built, or if they learned to dislike them after being bothered by the noise–it’s impossible to say in what way this information is significant.)

Even so–even though it is likely to overestimate the number of people truly bothered by noise from turbines–the total number of people reporting annoyance was quite low, only 31 out of 754. Think about this: they were only asked for their opinion. No doctor screened their responses. Out of the 31 who reported annoyance, just over a third reported that it disturbed their sleep.

All the usual caveats apply: just one study, needs to be replicated, rather small sample size, and so on. In the meantime, there appears to be little support for halting the construction of new wind turbines on the basis of “Wind Turbine Syndrome.”

I’m in the middle of Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, and I thought the following passage was appropriate for the first day of 2009:

A familiar biological tease argues that a hen is an egg’s way of making a new egg. Likewise, have we evolved plants to create agriculture, or have plants used agriculturalists to evolve themselves? From a coevolutinoary perspective, both propositions are true. What is the difference between a squirrel burying acorns across the forest and humans planting potatoes across the globe? Who is the master, and who is the servant? Is it the acorn’s or potato’s idea to be nutritious, or the creature that buries them? Evolution is not about design or will; it is the outcome of constant endeavors made by organisms that want to survive and better themselves. The collective result is intoxicatingly beautiful, rife with oddities, and surpassingly brilliant, yet no agent is in control. Evolution arises from the bottom up–so, too, does hope. When fire destroys a forest, the species and plants that were lost will reassert themselves over time. Seeds that have lain dormant for decades and that germinate only when subjected to intense heat will come to life, burst into foliage, and bloom in the spring. These plants may have deep taproots that bring up minerals, or broad leaves that create a canopy to help preserve the topsoil from sun and rain. The older the forest, the more resilient its capacity to regenerate. Humanity is older than the oldest forest. Its capacity to adapt and restore is vastly underestimated. Evolution is optimism in action.

According to a story in today’s Globe and Mail, residents near Algonquin Park are fighting the Ontario government’s decision to try to site a wind farm nearby. Why? Because wild areas should be preserved in all their unspoiled glory.

Brent Peterson, a cottager who speaks for 45 families with property on McCauley Lake, says this is not a case of NIMBYism, where people simply don’t want to get too close to the necessary but obtrusive aspects of life. He says it’s not about individuals but about an unspoiled area that is “about to be industrialized.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me to go and tear down a forest to put industry in the name of green,” Mr. Peterson said. “Some areas don’t make sense for the green industry, aesthetics or no aesthetics.”

There’s only one problem here:

There’s no such thing as “wild.” “Unspoiled” vanished approximately 10,000 years ago when the first humans traipsed across the land bridge into North America. This idea that any space without obvious human constructions such as buildings or roads in it is somehow pristine or unaltered is both persistent and completely false.

Human beings are animals. All animals modify their environments. Beavers cut down trees and flood forests with their dams. Insects devour forests. Beech seedlings can’t grow under adult beech trees, and maple seedlings can’t grow under adult maple trees, which is directly responsible for Southern Ontario’s very stable mix of beech and maple trees in its climax ecosystems. The shallow roots and acidic leaves of pine trees choke out the undergrowth. Ants distribute trillium seeds by eating their juicy exteriors. Humans are no exception to this. Whether you can see our activities tangibly on the landscape in something definitely human like a hut or a skyscraper or a wind turbine or a dam is irrelevant; even in the depths of the amazon rainforest, the activities of the local hunter-gatherers have modified the mix of species (in such a way that species edible to humans are far more dominant than they otherwise would be). Layers of pollution coat the antarctic, thanks to air and water currents. And Algonquin Park? Thanks to 10,000 years of human habitation, even before the arrival of the Europeans, Algonquin Park is already not what it would have been without us. By now it is dramatically different. We camp there, hike there, fly over it, fish it, hunt in it, burn coal upwind of it. It is not pristine. It only looks pristine.

There is no wild.

Humans will inevitably modify any environment they live in or nearby. We are animals; we can’t exempt ourselves from natural processes, even with good intentions.

Rather than ask ourselves, “what can we do to keep this place unspoiled?”, which is impossible and puts us in a losing position from the outset, it would be more constructive to ask, “what are the effects of this activity likely to be, and do we want those effects, or not?”

I should preface the photo posts by emphasizing that I’m putting up what I find interesting, not what necessarily would win any photography contests.

This creek runs through a small ravine behind several detached homes, and is part of the Don River watershed. The greenspace it runs through isn’t part of the park or trail systems, but it’s well-used. It is, quite clearly, not untouched or pristine, given the wire that likely once created gabion baskets. It’s all incorporated into a natural system now that seems to run without any human inputs–save the dog-walkers and the offerings they may leave behind.

(The first couple of posts will constitute the inevitable throat-clearing while I get a few things out of the way, such as: who am I, what am I talking about, and why should you read me?)

When I was a child, I spent weeks at my grandparents’ cottage, near Apsley, Ontario. It was a shack. At night I fell asleep listening to mice scuttering through the ceiling; there was no insulation, no heat, no air-conditioning. The running water was not safe to drink (we brought bottles up from the city). No self-respecting city-dweller would consent to rent such a place for a weekend nowadays, but that’s where I learned to love place. The sandy floors of those pine forests are still a part of me. The daddy long legs and the pinecones going over the waterfall. The minnows swimming around my toes, the roar of trucks going by on the highway just over the creek.

Later on, I spent weeks away at camp in the Algonquin Park. I went camping with friends. I fished. I gardened (badly, most of the time). Never for more than a few weeks a year, most of my time spent in the same stultifying suburbs as everyone else–in the foodcourts of shopping malls, in bookstores, movie theatres, on field trips, in science classrooms, my bedroom, the bedrooms of friends, in cars, buses, on sidewalks–but it was enough, apparently, because if you told me I had to move to a place where I would never again see a trillium bloom, I don’t think I could do it.

When sad or lonely or angry, I’d go to a park. I’d walk through a greenspace along the banks of a creek hardly more than a drainage ditch, sometimes late at night, goldenrod growing as tall as my shoulder by late summer, Queen Anne’s Lace and snapdragons thick in the sunnier spots. Nothing exotic, nothing special. But that too must have been enough. Enough to convince me that Nature isn’t something you get into a car and drive out of the City to find.

When I graduated from highschool I went to a nearby university and studied Environment and Resource Studies, a real actual honest-to-god major, graduated with honours, and worked for ten years in the field in a variety of capacities. Environmental assessments, contaminated sites remediation, hazardous waste management, transportation of dangerous goods, recycling, office greening practices, tree plantings, environmental planning, carpool ridematching services, spills response, high-rise composting programmes. A bit of everything.

I also love words. I tried to write my first novel at the age of seven and it’s been a non-stop compulsive stream of dead trees covered with ink ever since.

I love nature. Humans, being animals, are just another part of nature, and I love people too, if that doesn’t sound too corny. After ten years of slogging away on the front lines of the environmental movement, I still haven’t lost faith that most people are genuinely doing the best that they know how. I think our problems are inertia, ignorance and fear, not malevolence or pathological selfishness.

I snapped this about a week ago, in a mini-greenspace during our first substantial snowfall. After the snowstorms this week, no ground is visible anymore.
<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/h6k6nqjvpj&#8221; rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

It’s my untested belief that expertise in any technical field will result in a near-total loss of respect for journalism.

I know it did for me. The more I learned about climate change, the biodiversity crisis, environmental regulations, and renewable energy, the more I realized that newspaper articles reflected reality only by chance, in passing. More often, an ill-equipped person with good writing skills and no critical thinking ability would write a piece far outside of their education and background by interviewing a bunch of people who claimed to be experts, without evaluating their credentials. We get climate change pieces giving equal weight to well-respected international climate experts and oil-funded PR hacks, pieces on renewable energy with well-reasoned arguments by scientists quoting the best available information and fruit-loop arguments by naturopaths who wouldn’t recognize a herz if it came up and hit them on the head.

And you end up with a voting public almost completely muddled on key issues because they’ve come to the completely totally 100% incontrovertibly WRONG conclusion that there are two sides.

Of course people are entitled to their opinions. I am legally well within my rights to believe that Mars is peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen. But the legal right to hold an opinion is not the same, and can’t be the same, as the attitude that reality is then required to bend to accommodate that opinion. No matter what I believe, Mars is in fact NOT peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen, or by anything at all. The experts are right and I am just plain wrong. (Or I would be, if I held that opinion.)

This set of science experiments sheds some light on the psychology of our inherent tendency to give equal weight to two contrary opinions, even when one comes from an expert and the other does not. Fortunately, for those of you who have no intention of purchasing the article for the low-low price of $10, you can also read this fun summation in the Washington Post.

This went on for 256 intervals, so the two individuals got to know each other quite well — and to know one another’s accuracy and skill quite well. Thus, if one member of the group was better than the other, both would pretty clearly notice. And a rational decision, you might think, would be for the less accurate group member to begin to favor the views of the more accurate one — and for the accurate one to favor his or her own assessments.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, report the study authors, “the worse members of each dyad underweighted their partner’s opinion (i.e., assigned less weight to their partner’s opinion than recommended by the optimal model), whereas the better members of each dyad overweighted their partner’s opinion.” Or to put it more bluntly, individuals tended to act “as if they were as good or as bad as their partner” — even when they quite obviously weren’t.

The researchers tried several variations on the experiment, and this “equality bias” didn’t go away. In one case, a “running score” reminded both members of the pair who was faring better (and who worse) at identifying the target — just in case it wasn’t obvious enough already. In another case, the task became much more difficult for one group member than the other, leading to a bigger gap in scores — accentuating differences in performance. And finally, in a third variant, actual money was offered for getting it right.

None of this did away with the “equality bias.”

The research psychologists attribute this to our need to belong to groups and get along with people. It seems that need outweighs any practical consideration, a good deal of the time, including when money is on the line. Fascinating, right? People who are right and know they’re right defer to people they know are wrong in order to get along and maintain group dynamics, even when it costs them to do so.

When it comes to climate change, this is a serious problem.

Aside: Climate change is a real thing that is really happening and is a complete and total catastrophe. There is no debate on this point in any credible scientific circle. If you think that there is, I’m so sorry, but you’ve been had.

/aside

We end up not moving forward with policy solutions because we keep acting like the actual experts and the paid non-expert hacks share some kind of equivalence when they patently don’t.

But–and I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking this–it’s present in every community, including the SBC.

Ah! See? I told you I’d come around to it.

People act as if the opinions and contributions of experts and amateurs are equivalent when they are not.

Thankfully, the fates of human civilization and a minimum of 30% of animal and plant species do not rest on this fact. The worst that happens in most cases is that a person walks around for a good long time in a garment that looks like utter shit and feels really fabulous about it. On a scale of worldwide catastrophe, it doesn’t even rank.

On the other hand, as this science makes pretty clear, an entire generation of sewers are being educated largely by internet celebrities who are too incompetent even to understand how incompetent they are. It’s not a catastrophe, no, but it is a crying shame. And as predicted by the social psychologists, if anyone ever speaks up to point out that some of them are experts and other are, well … not …, they are pilloried as Mean Girls, jelluz haterz, and bullies.

Aside 2: Yep, I count myself in the group of people sometimes wandering happily about in a garment that on later reflection was not up to snuff. It happens. We’re all human. I won’t melt if someone points it out, though tact is always preferred. It doesn’t count as “bravery” to “put yourself out there” if you feel entitled to nothing but praise; and if you’re going to present your work in public you need to be prepared for public criticism.

/aside

So it’s not the end of the world, no, but it’s a detriment to all of us. The people getting the money, in many cases, haven’t earned it; the people with valuable skills to share don’t have the platform to do so; we keep acting as if everyone’s equal when they’re not to be Nice and keep everyone happy, even though not everyone is happy; there are entire boiling lava rivers of resentment and bitterness flowing right under all the green meadows we’re so happily skipping over (in our badly-pressed culottes and boxy tops with peter pan collars, no less). It’s weird. Can’t we, as an online culture, agree that it’s not a violation of the Geneva Convention if someone points out that a hem is crooked or a print isn’t matched? Does it matter if it’s not “nice”? Don’t we all benefit from increased honesty and openness? Do any of us actually expect to be perfect, or need to be treated as if we are perfect in order to function day to day? If you really don’t want people to point out how you fucked up, is it so much to ask that you acknowledge it yourself, then? Hey look at this horrible side seam–I really fucked up!

That went off on a bit of a tangent. Pardon me. Let’s drag it back on track:

The Equality Bias! It makes everything worse while we smile and pretend nothing’s wrong. Fight it!

Naomi’s political lens is so focused that it’s blinding. This is less a book about climate change than it is about why climate change is now the perfect excuse to do everything she’s always wanted to do anyway (eg. scrap globalization, redistribute wealth), which is fine, but she ignores any contrary evidence. For example, she has a brief section on the brief flourishing and untimely death of Ontario’s green energy economy, which she blames 100% on the WTO’s decision on domestic content. The waffling and delays of government regulators on applications, the constant changes in direction, and the dead-set-contrarian politics of the mostly rural ridings where wind energy projects were to be sited were completely overlooked, but as anyone who actually went through the process can tell you, the domestic content reg change was the least of any developer’s worries, and came after years and years of frustrations brought about by the public sector.

She spends a great deal of time criticizing anyone else whose political perspectives change how they perceive climate science and solutions, but is much, much worse herself in this book. No information penetrates unless it conforms with her pre-existing beliefs. But the global carbon cycle is not sentient. It doesn’t care how carbon emissions are reduced; it doesn’t even care if they are reduced at all. It does not vote and has no political preferences. WE do; and so it’s up to us to make some decisions about if and how we’re going to turn things around. It should be a mark of deep shame to any thinking citizen in a democratic society that authoritarian China is pulling so far ahead in the transition to a renewable economy.

The flaws with This Changes Everything can be boiled down to two, major, fundamental issues:

1. She acts as if the private and public spheres were diametric and opposed, rather than almost entirely overlapping. A person who works all day in a corporation then goes home and becomes a voter and consumer. People move back and forth between the private and public sector in terms of employment all the time. We are not talking about two different species–the private, evil homo sapiens determined to ruin the earth at a profit and the loving, public homo sapiens trying desperately to save it. It’s all just people.

2. The public sphere is as complicit in this as the private sphere. The reason we do not have a healthy, thriving renewable energy sector in Ontario right now is because the people of Ontario didn’t want it. They had it, and then put the politicians of the province under so much pressure to gut it that eventually they did to save their mandate. The moratorium on offshore wind projects in Ontario is a perfect example: two (small) corporations were all set to do the assessment work necessary to figure out if their Lake Ontario projects would work or not, but the government made offshore projects in Ontario illegal because the voters in Scarborough demanded it.

This is a terrible book on climate change. You’d be better off reading almost anything else on the subject.